nonsite » 2009 » February

February 28, 2009 4:57 pm

February 28, 2009: Manifesto of Possibilities

Cameron Cartiere, from Birkbeck College, University of London gave an excellent presentation at the CAA around her large research project which began in 2006 as a series of three community meetings on Public Art and Community Engagement, (May 8, 2006) at the Tate, Art Community and Urban regeneration, (May 16) at the Greater London Authority (GLA) on Art, Community and Urban Regeneration, and finally Art Activism and the Community (May 24, 2006) at the Whitechapel.

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Her research into Public Art then took her to organize a wiki in 2007: Building Cultures: A Manifesto of Possibilities which explored the changing role of public art as a negotiating power. In addition to a series of public presentations to various constituencies she has printed a poster of this manifesto which she will send you on request.

February 26, 2009 12:55 pm

February 26, 2009: CAA in the City of Angels

I’m in Los Angeles for the CAA 2009 the 97th annual conference of the College Art Association. It is an interesting meeting in that it brings together what must be at least a thousand artists, art historians, curators and art administrators, along with many more hundreds of recent art school and university graduates looking for jobs within art schools and academia. It’s been called a meat market and some of those aspects are definitely there, with many schools doing interviews for faculty for the next academic year.

It is also a big part of the academic validation for art historians in particular, where presentations at conferences like this are seen as part of what is required to maintaining your stature within your field. That said this is the event that draws the big names in our field. The CAA is an American organization with all the complexity of what that means and it is clearly a different contemporary world that we are seeing described this year. What’s been interesting for me, in addition to catching up with some old friends who are here, is to see how the topics of what I think are the most interesting panels have changed since I last attended two years ago in Boston. Maybe it’s just LA, with its ongoing interest in social justice, but the most interesting panels have been on topics of cultural production outside or on the fringes of institutions and academia.

I started attending Artist Educator Innovations to hear Sanjit Sethi speaking about the California College of Arts: Center for Art and Public Life as I knew it to be a model in best practices. It was started by Suzanne Lacy in 2000 and is now co-directed by Sanjit Sethi and Anne Wettrich who also spoke.

I shifted sessions to Relocating Art and Its Public to hear Kim Yasuda from UC Santa Barbara talk about the California Institute for Research in the Arts. She draped a towel by David Shrigley over the lectern. Gregory Sholette from Queens College, City University of New York gave an excellent polemical introduction to his theory of artworld Dark Matter, discussing the invisible mass of unrecognized, unsuccessful art educated individuals who continue their practice as artists outside the sanctioned system of social production we call the art world. They form a large, shadow art world and what a huge unregulated effect they have- by being part of the art public- seeing exhibitions, buying art magazines, working in art related jobs.

He argued that as artists we have to embrace our redundancy, that we are part of a surplus economy, and with the larger world economy ‘hitting the skids’ it means it is time for us to embrace and look to artists who have coexisted for so long outside of an institutionalized art space. He ended his presentation by posing two questions- first: What do institutions want? and second given the ‘neo-liberal’ mantra that: we have to be creative, he then finally asked: what would it be to resist creativity?

February 24, 2009 12:53 pm

February 24, 2009: What Happens in Halifax

Mario Garcia Torres’ What Happens in Hailfax stays in Halifax (in 36 slides) 2004- 2006, exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale relates closely to my current research. This project recuperates a particular student exercise set in autumn 1969 for David Askevold’s Project Class by the American conceptual artist Robert Barry based on a shared secret idea common to the group.

I like that Mario Garcia Torres recuperates this project almost forty years later in a different context.

February 23, 2009 3:00 pm

February 23, 2008: Social RFID and Mapping

In October in Amsterdam, debailiemedia hosted a conference on Social RFID and Mapping Future Histories of RFID, where debates on RFID connectivity. I’m interested in th idea that RFID could be integrated with ideas of web 2.0 social networks and and exploration of the social web.

One of the key workshops was with Richard Rogers, Director of govcom.org which has designed issuecrawler software which has pulled some very interesting issue network maps. They have also designed a number of interesting applications like viagratool for assessing information politics on the web. Anne Helmond has been doing research with the Digital Methods Initiative on visualizing whether RFID imagery is “wet” or “dry”. Wet are images have something to do with people, animals and other living things. Dry means basically the technical things- interesting way to catagorize a google images search.

Last week, the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress met in Barcelona with more than 55,000 visitors- amazing numbers! Interesting to note that GPS phones linked to cameras by Sony Ericsson and Nokia. Nokia’s N96 will geotag your photos automatically. I’m wondering if this might be useful for my project. The Wired correspondent Charlie Sorrel, notes that GPS is still too much of a battery drain and suggests faux-GPS using WiFi triangulation. He also writes about all the latest phones including the Android Googlephone.

February 23, 2009 1:35 pm

February 23, 2009: silent critque

We were asked to propose several questions for a presentation of our artworks for a critique from our colleagues. We were to each post our questions in advance.

My questions for this critique are as follows:
1. Can a text heavy website be compelling enough as an artwork for the viewer to take the time needed to reflect on the content?
• Here I was considering whether my colleagues felt that the viewer would take the time required to give my nonsite project a close read.
2. How does this website which can be read anywhere at anytime online relate to an exhibition.
• Here I was reflecting on the difficulty of considering exhibiting a website within the context of an exhibition.
3. How would one present a website appropriately in the context of a large group exhibition- in this case the Camberwell 2009 exhibition?
• This question is self evident.
4. Do you think there should be some particular ‘visual’ aspect or manifestation to this project- beyond the website, for an exhibition?
• Here I was wondering if my colleagues felt that the viewer needed some kind of visual hook within the context of the Camberwell 2009 Summer exhibition in order to consider actually viewing my nonsite project.

I wish I could say that I received thoughtful and considered responses and feedback to my four questions, but sadly I did not.

February 22, 2009 9:20 pm

February 22, 2008: GPS Drawing

I’ve had a productive morning researching various leads developed out of GPS drawing. Jeremy Wood and Hugh Prior seem to have received quite a bit of attention for what they’ve been up to, which is great. There’s a great link to an article in Made magazine for how to make a GPS drawing. I wish I was more interested in some of the drawings they’ve produced, most are quite banal- like the Brighton Elephant. However, Jeremy Wood’s map GPS Tracks Over London is very beautiful.

Somehow I got a reference to Timo Arnall, a designer based out of Oslo, and his blog elasticspace opened up some exciting ideas for me about Near Field Communications (NFC) which links RFID objects with mobile telephones. He links to a mapping RFID project. The weblog for this project is Touch, which features link to a research project the Lisa Smith is working on out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

February 20, 2009 6:17 pm

February 20, 2008: GPS drawing and mapping

While I was doing some reseach on GPS systems, I found that there is a Global Positioning System Drawing Project called Mapping the Imagination on at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the Julian and Robert Breckman Prints and Drawings Gallery

February 20, 2009 8:54 am

February 20, 2009: MA Research at Camberwell

Next week we have set up a critique situation with the other MA Digital Arts students currently at Camberwell. I don’t really have a sense of who most of the other students outside our group are. I’ve been in touch with Zai Tang and Simon Ball briefly via email and they both seem great- enthusiastic and committed to what they’re doing.

I realized this morning that one of the complexities of most research is that it tends to be collaborative and carried out by small groups of people with similar interests or who embark on that research based on common concerns. However what seems to have happened at Camberwell now, at this point in this semester is that this idea of artist as researcher, seems to have fallen away and shifted radically to artist as exhibitor. We are all now focusing on the large Camberwell 2009 exhibition which will be mounted this summer to open July 7, 2009.

Research is a more speculative endeavour. Making results public and disseminating research is not usually dependent on an external timeline like this group exhibition. There’s a contradiction there. I guess you could also argue that research doesn’t neatly fit into the one or two year timeline of a MA with units and learning outcomes either.

What seems to have fallen by the wayside within this Camberwell program is the original research paradigm and the questions that were asked when we applied for this MA. What were our research questions- what are we proposing to discover or explore; what is the context- what work, both theoretical and practical, relates to our projects; what will our methodologies be- what methods will we employ to research our projects; and finally what resources will we need- what equipment, facilities and expertise will we require to carry out our research?

Instead these larger research questions are being replaced with the exigencies of a large group exhibition- we need a 500 word artist’s statement to accompany our work and figure out the technical requirements from our work.

I’m not sure how to address this question with my colleagues and fellow students. What is the real purpose of this Camberwell 2009 summer exhibition as it relates to our various research projects?

February 18, 2009 7:34 pm

February 18, 2009: What was NSCAD?NSCAD

Reading Marc Augé’s Non-Sites has been great in that it has made me reflect on what I believe were the qualities that made the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design a place. What was NSCAD?

I have written earlier that I was there ‘back in the day’, but what does that mean? NSCAD back in the day was mythic. It was a place, but it was also an idea- that you could create an art school in a small town in a province on the east coast of Canada than could have an impact on the world of contemporary art. What an amazing proposition!

You need a hang-out, a centre where people can meet- at NSCAD in the 1970s it was the library.

February 17, 2009 1:26 pm

February 17, 1976: Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager presents himself as a very traditional artist. I liked him and his work immediately. I appreciate his dry sense of humour. He’s older than I thought, but once he started showing his work his age makes sense. I knew him as this mythic artworld carpenter who fabricated Claes Oldenburg’s 1963 Bedroom Ensemble. He didn’t talk about that.

He showed a brief, twenty year chronological retrospective of his work starting in the late 50’s. The work changed as he received more recognition and acclaim and began showing with Leo Castelli. The architectural drawings on these textured grounds, and the swirly formica sculptures that look like they should be paintings, all of which have these elaborate oversized frames incorporated as part of the works seem smart.

richard-artschwager

I’m particularly struck by these small lozenge shaped objects that he first showed for the opening of PS1 in 1971. I love the idea that he can place them anywhere, they were installed in various ‘non’ locations throughout the building.

February 16, 2009 1:01 pm

February 16, 2009: spectacular commodity

I was listening to Glen Branca’s composition The Spectacular Commodity last night and I realized- what a perfect description for a work of art. An artwork is a spectacular commodity. It is unique, limited in production, and has the potential for amazing value, as assigned by the art markets and museums.

This isn’t unique to a work of art obviously. Any commodity with limited production or in scarce supply has that potential, but I think the work of art is singularly unique in that the quantity of product is finite and limited to the artist’s lifetime of production. Artists don’t necessarily think of their work in their work these terms- at least not while starting out or as students, but this concept is consistently reinforced by the subtext of the art objects we are shown in art history and visual culture courses.

How does a society assign value, how does it change over time and implicitly as artists, don’t we want our work to be part of this valuation. What’s interesting is that an artwork may have great personal value yet little commercial market value. I’m thinking now of a particular painting I made in the autumn of 1976 during my last semester as a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. It is a small painting of two similarly articulated towers tentatively painted in a brick coloured, earth red within the crudely drawn black linear forms that float on a light grey ground.

dmacwilliam

The painting is about 18 by 24 inches, on very heavy unstretched canvas. It pins to the wall. Based on a drawing I had made a few weeks earlier, it embodies all the qualities I thought a painting should have at that time. It was abstract, modest, personal, ambiguous in scale, tentative, anxious. These were all of the qualities I thought a painting needed to have at that time to recuperate and ressusitate painting from its earlier macho market excesses.

I have kept it with me over the past thirty years as a talisman for my development as an artist and a reminded of those heady days in Halifax. I donated it to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax in 2007 as part of the NSCAD archives there. As part of a Canadian Cultural Properties donation, it was assessed at a fair market value of $6000. It is interesting that if I was asked to assign a value, I would have said more than ten times that amount.

February 10, 2009 5:07 pm

February 10, 1975: Robin Peck, Robert Eardley

Robin Peck hired nine local carpenters to each build a three foot wooden cube which was then painted grey for his exhibition with Robert Eardley at the Anna Leonowens Gallery. The nine cubes were arranged in a fiarly tight 3x 3 grid in the front of the gallery. We all thought the work was a brilliant: a dry, provincial critique of minimalism.

February 10, 2009 12:49 pm

February 10, 1976: Theodore Wan

Theodore Wan exhibited Two 120 Rolls and Six 35mm Negatives, Photographs not by Theodore Wan, at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, February 10 - 15, 1976. For this project Theodore wrote away to a classified ad in a men’s magazine, I’m not sure which one, to purchase exposed rolls of film negatives of nude women taken by a unnamed photographer who was selling them through an ad placed at the back of the magazine.

Theodore was researching authorship, what was socially acceptable and in this case: what was considered erotica or pornography.

He became increasingly interested in vernacular photography. He did extensive work as a medical photographer and as a performance artist, he used himself as a subject for medical self-portraits. Exhibiting his photographs in hospitals- illustrating draping procedures and bridine scrubs for nurse training. These photographs were understood very differently than when shown in an art gallery context.

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February 9, 2009 8:47 pm

February 9, 2008: Intellectual Property

We are in the process of finalizing an IP policy for Emily Carr University. We have had ongoing and extensive discussions with faculty and students over the past few years around some of the complexities involved around intellectual property.

In Canada there has been a great deal of debate recently around copyright. Mostly around music- because of Apple’s iPod and our ability to copy our CDs as MP3s and play them on our nanos. But recent technologies have upped the anti as it is now possible to play video as MP4s and now television. Copyright is protected by nation states and differs by the laws in each country, in Canada we have a copyright act written in 1997. It is under review and is currently in the process of being rewritten given the huge changes in digital technologies which weren’t anticipated back int he mid 90’s. For example, since 2003, the Canadian Private Copying Collective, had been trying to convince the Copyright Board of Canada to extend the levy we pay on blank CDs to the memory inside MP3 players.

February 8, 2009 5:17 pm

February 8, 2008: the networked city

Busy week, just now getting down to focusing on my project. Andy recommended William Mitchell’s Me++ which looks like a great book. I have it on order and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Everything seems connected to me lately, I was having coffee with a friend this week and we were talking about how Google maps were changing our sense of the world. My son is in Mexico at the moment and I when I get a note from him saying he was in San Christobal, the first thing I did was to check Google Maps to look up his location.

February 8, 2009 1:04 pm

February 8, 2009: Smithson’s Non-Sites, Augé’s Non-Places

When I was at the AGO in Toronto in December, I saw a Robert Smithson Nonsite from their permanent collection that they had up on exhibition. It had the map with the location noted and a zig-zag box with the earth from the site.

Smithson saw the nonsite as an indoor earthwork, the map was a ‘landmarker’. He chose remote, unpopulated sites and materials from these locations were brought into the gallery. Nonsites relate to Smithson’s research into site, displacement and location.

Smithson writes about these sites: “I began in a very primitive way;..started taking trips in 1965; certain sites would appeal to me more–sites that had been in some way disrupted…pulverized. I was really looking for a denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty…when you take a trip you need precise data & I would often use quadrangle maps; mapping followed traveling”

smithson

In contast Marc Augé writes about Non-Places: sites of excess- train stations, freeways, supermarkets, airports; places where people are in transit. Non-places are evidence of a supermodern world of acceleration, speed and excess. He writes about the problem of the overabundance of information and events that have overtaken our lives. Augé’s non-places are intermediate, overwhelming sites of information overload.

I’m considering these ideas of Smithson and Augé in relation to websites: in what way are websites nonsites or perhaps more appropriately: non-places?

February 7, 2009 1:06 pm

February 7, 2009: How Soon Is Now

Twenty four years ago, the Smiths released How Soon is Now? That’s now the borrowed title for the latest, large Vancouver Art Gallery group exhibition curated by Kathleen Ritter.

There was a huge opening last night for the exhibition. It was great to see such a huge crowd out to celebrate and congratulate their friends and colleagues. There is lots of good work. The exhibition represents a younger generation of artists, many of whom are in their early 30s and graduated from Emily Carr University in the last ten years and are showing at the VAG for the first time.

Highlights for me were Instant Coffee’s Nooks, Luanne Martineau’s hangings, Sonny Assu’s copper coffee cups and lids,

sonny-assu

Holly Ward’s dirt Island, Damian Moppett’s ceramic pots on top of his white remake of Anthony Caro’s Early One Morning (1962), Samuel Roy-Bois’s Practice Room, Christian Kliegel’s two Elevator Doors, Kathy Slade’s big black Pom Pom, and Brendan Tang’s amazing ceramic objects. One of the highlights was Cedric, Nathan and Jim Bomford’s amazing recycled wood bleachers construction in the two-story North Gallery.

February 2, 2009 10:43 pm

February 2, 2008: the sun is shining

It is always so amazing when spring comes to Vancouver. Today is a beautiful February day- cool but sunny. I’m listening to The Shins latest Wincing the Night Away. Every song on the album is excellent, beautifully considered- I’ve been listening to it for months and every time I put it on, I’m delighted. My favorite songs are Australia, Phantom Limb and A Comet Appears, great songs to listen to while doing research.

February 1, 2009 8:17 am

February 1, 2009: photographs and dates as mnemonics

I’ve been looking at some old photographs and I’m struck by how many memories they trigger. I’m sure it’s the same for everyone- different photographs but similar responses- memories flood back. I don’t have a lot of photographs from when I was younger, but my mother just gave me another pile that she found taken from when I was a child. I’ll scan one and post it shortly.

Dates seems like another interesting trigger for memories. I’m just not sure if the month- March 1984 is enough, or if you need the date for example- March 7, 1984 to really resonate. That was the day my son Kent was born.

Kent will be 25 on March 7, 2009!